Google's literary land-grab

If you click on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens in Google Book Search, you may find yourself taking an unexpected journey. Google's ambient advertising programme hotlinks to a dating agency called Great Expectations Dating ("Find Your True Love Today"). How crass is that? We can be sure that Dickens would have thought it so. Indeed, he would probably have reserved a special vituperation for Google's literary land-grab.

There are two aspects to this land-grab. The first involves scanning out-of-copyright work, provided by the great libraries, and surrounding it with such advertising. That's not illegal, though it is of cultural concern.

The second part of Google's literary predations, in the case of American libraries, involves scanning in-copyright works - for the purpose of publication - without direct prior permission of the copyright holder. That is to say, the author or his or her estate. Google's decision to scan first and ask permission later with copyrighted works is playing fast and loose. In America, it has already landed Google with a huge lawsuit from publishers.

It is authors who will suffer most. Dickens isn't around to defend the integrity of his work. Were he alive, he would certainly have tried. He campaigned with vigour on the issue of copyright. A number of his works were copied in America and he was an early advocate of international copyright protection. In England, he went to court to stop someone writing a continuation of A Christmas Carol. He dedicated Pickwick Papers to Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, who introduced the Copyright Bill in 1837.

In Dickens's spirit, I believe we need to take action against Google. Its quest to monetise for its own benefit the literature of the world must be stopped. So I call upon internet users worldwide to boycott the Google search engine until it ceases to scan books in America without prior permission, and desists from its mission to place ambient advertising on the great literary works. Switch your search engine from Google to MSN or Yahoo today, until you hear Google has withdrawn from the type of activities that have been described in another context as acts of "kleptomania".

Of course, Google doesn't describe its activities like that. The message is it's all for the global cultural heritage, not for profit. I understand a PR campaign has been commissioned to this effect, further to persuade authors and publishers to provide copies of their books to be scanned into Google Book Search without any upfront payment whatsoever. I don't buy it, anymore than I would buy anything from the ambient advertising programme.

You may be the sort of person who loves advertising to be directed at you at every opportunity. You may not feel that it is inappropriate for Google to run advertisements around the text of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for a walk-in medical clinic. Or to plumb an ad for "modern, economic waste disposal systems" into TS Eliot's Waste Land . Or to annex Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse with offers to holiday in a self-catering eight-storey tower. But I do.

At one level all this is quite funny. At another, it is shocking. The worst thing is that the actual money paid to authors and publishers for these silly ads is negligible. So is the number of book purchases arising directly from these links (certainly they were when Google's representative came to see me last autumn). Authors are being ripped off however you look at it. They need to say something about it, loudly.

Publishers also have serious responsibilities in this matter. It is possible in Google's contract for publishers to withdraw any book at any time. I call upon all publishers to do so immediately until these critical matters are resolved. No one will write much in future if they don't receive money for it because books are suddenly free on the net.

At the moment, Google only offers a proportion of a copyright book for free. But it insists on scanning 100 per cent of each book it loads and, moreover, on owning the rights to the resulting digital files of authors' works. This is a Pandora's box. It must be regarded as likely that a subsequent management regime at Google will pressure publishers to allow it to offer 100 per cent of the text as battles for market share are joined against the other mighty search engines.

Publishers also have the responsibility to make sure that when it comes to hosting electronic content in future, it is their own websites that host the downloads and the scans of text and audio. There is no reason to hand this content to third-party websites. That would only make publishers and authors subject to the commercial imperatives of other organisations - companies such as Google, with no long-term stake in authorship or publishing and no natural parallel interests. Search engines can find the same content on publishers' websites in a nanosecond. That's what search engines are for: searching. And publishers should then, as iTunes does with music tracks, charge a fair rate for their authors' content - not give it away like Google.

University and copyright libraries also have serious responsibilities in their dealings with Google. I believe that libraries such as the Bodleian and Harvard may have misinterpreted the missions with which their universities have entrusted them in handing over part of their collections for scanning. They may also have thrown away the biggest commercial opportunity in the history of their academic institutions by regarding content as somehow free (though they do get their own copy of the digital file). It isn't free of course. Governments funded students who paid the universities for, among other things, the running of their university libraries. And because they are copyright libraries, publishers are obliged by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act to give one copy of each book to those six copyright libraries for free. No one ever said it could be passed on in electronic form to a third party.

If there is to be money made out of scanning, the libraries themselves, not Google, should make it. Art collections provide a good example, as they often support themselves by licensing the images they have spent years (and millions) collecting. Yes, scanning a huge collection overnight is a huge expense but it does not have to happen overnight. The collections were written over two millennia; the online solution might decently take a long time.

What Google is doing to books is, by contrast, positively indecent. It is a good search engine, frequently used by all of us. I for one would like to see it keep to that core business. Until it lays off literature, or else pays for it, I hope the readers of the Guardian and many others will join this boycott.

· Nigel Newton is chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. This is an edited version of a speech given on Thursday to the Guardian Review's World Book Day forum. Go to Culture Vulture for a podcast of the full speech.

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